In the warm light of his office at NYU, I nod along as Julian continues his monologue.
The Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Age of Exploration.
They're all words and phrases that go in one ear and out the other. By the time I've had the chance to so much as decide what I'd like to write down for my notes, Julian's already moved on to something new. Thus, in my college-ruled notebook, I'm left with incomplete sentences, question marks, and abbreviations that I won't understand later. But Julian doesn't seem like the kind of professor who would take well to being told to slow down and repeat himself. He'll just tell me that there are methods to his madness.
"So the Crusades, which really didn't do all that well in taking back Jerusalem, had a completely unintended and yet positive effect on Western Europe. As I already mentioned, after the fall of the Roman Empire, Western Europe was largely cut off from the rest of the world and descended into the Dark Ages. But as a result of the Crusades, Christians began trading with Muslim merchants on an unprecedented scale.
"And of course, all of this cross-cultural interaction brought about monumental effects. Western Europe was exposed again to the texts of Aristotle and the other great Greek philosophers. They discovered Eastern medicine, math, and science, the most advanced of its time. They discovered paper pressing, shipbuilding techniques, the magnetic compass . . . they discovered the softest silks and finest spices the East had to offer.
"Surely all of this—and don't forget about the Reconquista, Mare—set the stage for the Renaissance. It surely jump-started Europe's ascent from the Dark Ages and into the light of the pre-modern era. Don't you think?"
I stare back at Julian from over his desk, still littered with his professor junk. Books, academic journals, and random scraps of notebook paper splay across the wood, and if anything, there's only more paper than there was last time. Julian's historically-themed knick-knacks and coffee cups lie around the mess, leaving for one precarious workspace.
This evening, my professor dons a red sweater and a pair of sweatpants. I can only hope that Julian doesn't wear the same ensemble to his actual classes. He lounges comfortably in his desk chair, looking for all the world like an eager nerd.
"It's all very interesting."
I prop an elbow on my own desk. From some closet or other, Julian managed to find a wooden folding desk for me. It's sparse compared to Julian's, with only my laptop, pathetic notebook, and a couple of pencils that ought to be sharpened. It also sits at a terribly awkward ninety-degree angle to Julian's desk.
"I'm not just saying that," I continue. "It's all very interesting. Really"
Julian has the unique ability to make even the driest of history interesting. Everything leads to something else, whether or not its effect was intended. Great empires rise and fall. Societies fight in the names of land and religion and power. One person changes the world with the stroke of a pen, yet an army of ten-thousand troops won't always get the job done. A nation will persecute another if only in the name of ignorance. People learn from each other and find ways to survive in the most adverse of circumstances.
Sometimes they don't survive.
Julian's poetic ramblings are getting caught up in my mind.
I got down to Greenwich Village sometime around five-thirty. Tonight, Tuesday, is our first official lesson. Julian, with great pain, took me through some math before he decided that he could take no more and moved on to a lecture about the High Middle Ages and Pre-Modern Europe.
It's eight now.
I nod to myself. "It's just a lot. A lot to absorb." I must sound like a total idiot.
But Julian returns my nod, apparently sympathizing with me. "History tends to be a lot. But the good news is that you still have a week to absorb it and make it into a lovely essay."
I try and fail to smile and nod. When Julian offered me my choice at his array of books, I might as well have chosen one with my eyes closed.
Well, I did look for one that was a little thinner than the others. Not the thinnest, because that would lead Julian to believe that I was scared of his books. Just one that was a little thinner. But dammit, I should've at least taken a glance inside of the paperback, because I just happened to choose the text with the smallest Roman font I've ever seen.
Humanism. My book is about humanism. Considering that I've barely made a dent into it, I'm still figuring out what exactly humanism is, but it's something about a Renaissance movement that celebrated the human accomplishments of intellectuals, artists, and politicians. Or something like that.
We'll have another lesson on Thursday, but come next Tuesday, my two-thousand-word paper—which must "take a stance on the impact of humanism in the scope of the pre-modern era"—will be due. Oddly enough, I don't think that I've ever been so nervous about an assignment before.
"It's good that you're nervous," Julian tells me.
I almost jump out of my chair at the way he reads me. It reminds me of something that Cal would do.
"It means that you want to do well on your paper."
Ducking my head, I reach for the backpack that I have deposited at the foot of my chair. I waste no time in shoving my notebook, then my laptop into it. I twist around myself for the jacket I have draped over my chair back.
"Yeah, I guess," I tell him in a sigh. "We'll see where it goes, though."
In a few ballet-like motions, I've gotten my coat over my shoulders and my backpack over my coat. I glance back at my professor with a quirked brow.
"You know, Julian, one of these days we're going to talk about you instead of me. I want to know about all of your hundred careers. I even want to hear about how you started contemporary dancing."
Julian grins back at me.
"Well, it's not quite a hundred. More like five or six. But I'll be happy to tell you all about them."
"She's probably asleep. She goes to bed at like eight."
From around the hall corner, I roll my eyes at my boyfriend's words.
"You should knock on her door really hard to wake her up. I bet she won't even mind once she sees that it's you, Maven." Cal's mocking voice rings down the hall.
A beat of silence. I imagine that it involves Maven glaring at his brother.
"Something tells me that I would regret doing that, Cal."
"You would," I agree, rounding the corner. My Converse pad along the carpet softly enough that neither of the brothers hears me coming. My backpack and jacket don't shuffle. My keychain doesn't even jingle. "What do you two losers want?"
By definition, both Maven and Cal are losers. Of the Monopoly variety, at least. I find the two brothers loitering at my door with mussed sets of black hair and irked expressions. Well, Cal's irked anyway. At the mere mention of the word loser, his eyebrows draw together and his mouth turns down into a grimace as he leans against the threshold of my door. He wears a rare grey long-sleeved-tee under his black T-shirt along with a pair of sweatpants. Maybe this is his fall look.
Maven, meanwhile, is sprawled out on the carpet, his blue eyes staring around at the cream-colored walls, ugly red and orange carpet, and honey wall sconces that appear between every other white door. He's wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, and a discarded Yankees cap waits at the floor beside him.
If Maven's laying on the floor, I have to wonder how long they've been here.
The trip around the corner isn't long, and I get to my boyfriend before he has the chance to get up. Hardly able to resist myself, I give him an affectionate little kick in the head with the toe of my Converse.
Maven grunts, but I don't miss the cute smile that flashes across his lips as he rolls over and gets up from the ground in a smooth motion. "Hi, Mare. Was that from your mom?" he asks.
"No," I say, shaking my head. I take a few more steps to my door as Maven follows me with a stack of papers that I'm just noticing he holds "If it was, you'd be unconscious. Is that my mail? You know mail theft is a felony, right?"
I point accusingly at the four envelopes, the ballet magazine that I recently subscribed to, and the useless store advertisements that have gotten a hold of my address along the line. One of the envelopes contains a paycheck, and another looks like a bank statement. The other two look useless.
The mail for the dancers that live at the Academy is kept downstairs in one of the administrative offices. It's usually guarded by a very nice secretary lady who's only supposed to give out the mail to the dancers that it belongs to.
Maven ends up opposite Cal on the other side of my door. "Since when do you care about felonies? Maybe I just felt the need to check if you were getting any love letters from other men."
I crack a smile as Maven at last hands me my mail. I glance through the promotions, happy to see that my Bath and Body Works coupons have arrived, even if they're accompanied by useless credit card offers.
I glance back and forth between them and my boyfriend.
"Oh, yeah. But most of those came last week. I'm waiting for my responses now, you know. I have a few boyfriend offers from those hot Russian ballet dancers, but mail just takes forever to get from Moscow to New York City. You know?"
No longer pleased with his own joke, Maven crosses his arms. "That was way too specific, Mare."
"So is there a reason that you guys are here or was it literally just to deliver my mail?"
I page through the rest of the papers and find one very suspicious-looking white envelope with Miss Barrow penned in Cal's handwriting across it. Cal and Maven is written at the top left of the paper, but somebody crossed it out and wrote in a half-cursive scrawl, Maven and Cal.
Unimpressed with the Calore brothers, I hand the rest of my mail back to Maven so that I can pull the tape from the envelope flap and open the thin parcel.
"What did you guys do?"
A repressed smile pulls at Cal's lips. He stares at the wall behind me as Maven glances on eagerly.
The envelope's contents spill out into my palm. In it, I find three glistening tickets with Saturday's date on them. In that black, blocky text that all tickets seem to have, I read "American Ballet Theatre," "Metropolitan Opera House," and "Manon."
It's the name of another classical, great ballet.
A giddy, uncontrollable smile bleeds across my lips. My cheeks are probably lined with creases of joy, and my eyes are probably illuminated by the glow of a thousand suns.
I've never gone to the ballet. It was too expensive, and even though I could've gotten the money for some of the nosebleed seats, nobody in the Barrow family ever possessed enough interest to take me and my stolen-money tickets. I would've had to drag Kilorn's dead body along to get him to go.
The tickets are smooth and cool in my palm. They look like molten gold if I aim them the right way at the hallway lights.
"We're going to the ballet," I state.
Maven and Cal nod to confirm my suspicions.
"Cal and I came up with the idea together," Maven says. There's something about the way that he looks at me that makes my heart pound. His eyes are full of joy, not because he's excited to see the ballet, but because he's excited for me to see the ballet.
Cal, despite his devastating loss at Monopoly to me, wears a similar expression. His bronze eyes match the color of the tickets. "We know you've never been the Met, and since you're going to be performing there soon enough as the prima ballerina, we thought that we'd take you," he continues. "We got the best seats, and we'll do a whole tour of the Met. I can pull some strings and get us backstage too."
"But just remember that the only reason we're not ditching Cal is that we need an adult chaperone," Maven says, frowning. He proceeds to glare at his brother.
Ah, yes. The Met has that ridiculous policy about how minors need to be accompanied by an adult chaperone. Maven and I are weeks from adulthood. And Cal is the glorious chaperoning age of nineteen.
The eldest Calore raises his hands in self-defense. "It's not my fault that you're a minor, Maven. But I do have one condition."
Already sensing it, I nod.
I'm too ecstatic to find any reason to roll my eyes or say something rude or sarcastic to Cal.
To my eternal delight, Cal had to cancel our lesson on Sunday evening. He sent me a last-minute text, saying that he had to go help his dad with some "stuff" downtown at Calore Industries. But he only delayed his revenge by three days, and I'm sure to go through hell tomorrow evening when I am indeed on the stage floor, begging Cal to let me stop doing push-ups.
The last part is wishful thinking on Cal's part. I'll suffer for a long, long time before I beg him.
"Maven and I won't exhibit any PDA," I tell Cal, even as Maven seems like he's ready to object. "We won't hold hands, and we won't kiss. We won't flirt, and we'll abstain from prolonged eye contact. That's what your condition is, right?"
Pleased that I knew, Cal nods. "Yes. I don't want to see any of . . that."
Maven opens his mouth, finding his brother's condition apparently unreasonable.
I put a placating hand out between the brothers.
"I think that we can manage, Maven. For Cal's sake."
"Slower."
Cal turns vicious again.
From his folding chair, my contemporary teacher watches me with a malign smile.
My arms shake with every descent and ascent from the stage. I try and fail to breathe in measures, and my breaths instead come out as angry, depressed grunts. My abs ache from holding them in, my palms sweat, and my shoulders strain from the weight of one-hundred-forty-seven perfect push-ups, by Cal's standards.
Sweat pastes the little hairs to my forehead. My entire body feels weak, like I've fallen out of it and am no longer in control. I only know one motion anymore, and every repetition of it brings hell to my entire being.
Losing that little control I have, my elbows give in on the rest of my body's weight. My stomach, hips, and legs hit the stage floor with a pathetic sound.
"Two-hundred-three to go," Cal chirps, crossing his ankles in my periphery.
Deciding that he wanted to watch me suffer up-close, Cal dragged his chair right over to where I positioned myself at the stage's center. He's watched me and counted as I've descended to the stage floor one-hundred-forty-seven times.
For staging a coup against him, Cal decided that three-hundred-fifty push-ups were an appropriate punishment. The irony isn't lost on me that Park Place costs three-fifty to buy from the bank.
With an arm that isn't far from spasming, I gesture at Cal. He gazes down at me, enjoying every twitch of my suffering.
"You can't possibly expect me to do three-hundred-fifty push-ups in one lesson, Cal," I reason. "This is like cruel and unusual punishment. You're not getting any closer to your ten-out-of-ten."
From the comfort of his chair, Cal leans forward.
"Don't dangle that in front of me. And I have time to watch."
I let my cheek rest on the floor and glare up from an odd angle at Cal.
"What if we came up with a payment plan?"
Cal shakes his head. "Did you offer me a payment plan when I landed on two of your yellow properties in one turn? No, you didn't. So why should I?"
I think of the red and black silk robe that I gave Gisa on Sunday afternoon when she, Mom, and I went out for lunch. I think of how she's going to rip out Cal's name and replace it with mine and how Cal will never fit in his precious robe again once she's finished with it.
"You're a sore loser," I hiss. "I won. I outplayed you. I may have used underhanded methods, but it was a fair game. And I won, and you lost."
As if weighing my words, Cal tilts his head back and forth. "I don't like to lose, it's true. But I would've handled losing better had you not lied to and manipulated me. If we ever play Monopoly again, I'll win, because I'll know next time who I'm up against."
I roll over so that I'm looking at the rafters.
My arms ache. The pain has gone to my head, and I blink lazily at the blinding light.
"Cal?"
"Yes, Mare?"
"I can't do two-hundred-three more push-ups."
A breath of silence.
"I know, Mare."
Cal's voice rings throughout all of the theatre.
My fingers drum against the stage. To save my eyes, I force myself to sit up. I regard Cal with the one-thousand shadowy seats at his back and the lights that turn him golden.
"You know," I start casually. "I can run. If you wanted me to do that 10K with you, I would."
I try to brace my palms behind me, only to realize that my arms can no longer support the slightest of weight. However ridiculous I look, I take the biceps of one of my arms into my other hand and start gently rubbing them.
Another breath of silence.
"I was wondering when you were going to tell me that."
Cal looks on thoughtfully from his chair.
"What do you mean?"
My teacher laughs softly, but it has the effect of ringing across the auditorium.
"Maven mentioned to me one time how you told him that you and one of your brothers are really into running. He said that you said you can run a sub-twenty 5K and a sub-ninety half marathon. You've been running forever. You must enjoy it, I imagine.
"I was hurt when I mentioned the 10K and you didn't give me a reaction. I was like, wow. She really, really wants to avoid running with me, even though she's really, really good."
Cal's talking about Shade, of course. He's the only one quicker than me in all of East Harlem. Running was always our thing. It made us feel free of everything that bound us back home, and it kept us in shape too. We might've had next to nothing in East Harlem, but we could run. We entered all of our local 5ks with our scrap money. Up until Shade left, we ran one of the half marathons out in Jersey City every summer. Up until July, I was still doing a fair bit of running myself.
So he knows. I blink at Cal. "I just didn't want you to feel embarrassed when you realized that I was way faster than you."
Cal chuckles as though I've told a joke. "So when are we going on this run?"